[CentOS] Three Identical systems - short cut to setting up the drives?

Fri Jul 4 12:30:12 UTC 2008
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> I am building three identical systems.  Well they will have different
> host names, and with time the software setups will drift. But at install
> time they are identical.
..snip...
> I would hope this is faster than 2 more installs.

its not

do the install over the network from a http server, given the same 
network, it would be many times faster to do the 2nd and 3rd install 
using the ks.cfg generated from the 1st one ( as Terry Polzin already 
pointed out ).

It will be many times faster than doing DD images of entire drives. eg. 
in my case here, i can provision a new machine in 2 min and 43 seconds 
for a base+core minimal centos-5 install. installing over http from a 
machine on a GiB/sec link and installing to a 2 disk raid-1

- KB